Q&A: New Red Hat boss targets virtualization, execution as keys to future

Less than 40 days ago, Jim Whitehurst stepped into the role of CEO at Red Hat replacing industry icon Matt Szulik, who continues to serve as chairman of the board. With Red Hat's navigation duties in his hands, Whitehurst plans to focus on execution as a path to future success with the operating system and enterprise infrastructure software. The new CEO took time out of his preparation to deliver the keynote at next week’s JBoss World conference to talk with Network World Senior Editor John Fontana about his background, his plans to conquer the enterprise infrastructure market, Linux desktops, virtualization, Red Hat's role in the future of open source, and of course, Microsoft and its patent crusade.

You have a diverse background, consulting, COO at Delta, but no real hands on within open source, so why are you a fit for Red Hat?

I think the good news is that Red Hat's core strategy is pretty solid. Ninety percent of what a leader does is about execution. I would any day rather have a lesser strategy executed flawlessly than a flawless strategy executed haphazardly. And I think I bring a whole series of skills around execution. Secondly, I also have some big company experience. Remember, just four years ago Red Hat broke $100 million, so this is a company that still has a lot to do in developing the processes and the systems and the governance structures to continue to scale and be effective and make sure [those things] don't slow the business. Having been at a big company and kind of knowing those structures well, I think I bring a lot to the table to make sure that our internal capabilities never become a hindrance. While I am not from an IT background, I am relatively techie, have hacked on Linux for many years, been a big Fedora user for quite a long time, and so I do kind of understand the community to some extent.

You have a strong business background, is signing a cross-patent licensing deal with Microsoft still bad business for Red Hat?

If we knew what kind of patent issues we had that would be helpful. So it is hard to have productive conversation if we don't know what they are. So it’s way too early to say that. To be clear, I am not some type of religious zealot, I do not have a problem having relationships with proprietary software companies, but we need to think about if it is good for the customers. Interoperability - great - but we would like to do that on open standards. But in terms of patents, it would be helpful if Microsoft would be a little more forthcoming.

Red Hat is attempting to move beyond being just an OS vendor, what’s on your to-do list to meet that goal?

We are in a good position in that we have two core product lines that are extremely successful and are in massive markets – RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and the layered products that sit on top of that: security, file system, JBoss and the SOA platform. Those are massive, massive markets and we are relatively a small share player. 

If you look at data center infrastructure - kind of a broad definition - globally it is nearly a hundred billion dollar market. We are a $500 million company. If you look at the quality of our technology, the power of our open source development model and the quality of our brand, we have a long, long way to go to reach our full potential. So certainly we will move beyond just the OS, and I think we are already doing that to some extent. But let me say, 30 days in is a little early to start prescribing strategy, but based on 30-days-in it would take a pretty strong argument for me to want to get outside of data center infrastructure.